George Bernard Shaw - Differences between Shaw and Wilde

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George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and came to London at the age of twenty. At first, he dedicated his life in dramatic criticism. He was so admiring of Henrik Ibsen's works, that he wrote in 1891 The Quintessence of Ibsenism (one of his most famous critical works). He was an active supporter of social justice and women's rights movement and, in 1884, he joined the Fabian Society, an organization promoting socialism. His affection to these so 141e42b cial struggles made him write an essay called 'The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism'. He was even for a simplification and reform of the English alphabet. All Shaw's plays have a preface telling about the theme the author wants to convey to. The most Important plays by Shaw are 'Man and Superman' (1903), 'Pygmalion' (1913) and 'Back to Methuselah'. In 1925 Shaw won the Nobel Prize. He died in 1950.

Shaw's masterpiece is "Pygmalion" whose title is inspired by "Metamorphoses" by Ovid, a Greek legend telling about a sculptor who scorns a statue of a woman and falls in love with it; Aphrodite (the goodness of love) transforms the sculpture into a real woman and, at the end, the artist marries his creation. "Pygmalion" is a play dealing with a bet between Mr Higgins, a phonetician Professor, and his friend Colonel Pickering: Higgins has to transform the way of speaking of a poor lady called Eliza Dolittle, so she can pass for a duchess. Mr Higgins succeeds in this metamorphosis, but he has to face Eliza's rebellion. Anyway, at the end of the drama, Eliza gets married with a gentleman.

According to Shaw, language is seen as expression of society and in this play it is very easy to notice the antithesis between the cultured language (represented by Higgins and the social environment he belongs to) and the poor language (represented by Eliza and low classes in general). In fact, as we can see in the extract called 'What's to become of me' (pages 173-174-175), the author uses a various mix of registers and accents. For example the text is plenty of words not following grammar rules ("Ive" and "havnt" in line 7, "Thats" in line 8, "didnt" in line 12 and so on) and the most important is the one in line 22 ("them slippers"). The text puts into evidence even another theme: the relationship between man and woman; 'though Mr Higgins has a patriarchal behaviour towards Eliza, he sees her just like the result of a linguistic experiment. He has a poor opinion of woman in general (typical idea of Victorian Age) and, consecutively, he can't really understand Eliza's feelings and needs. Meanwhile Eliza feels continuously misunderstood by Mr Higgins and, at the same time, she's really angry with him because she knows she has been cheated. Besides she knows she lost her identity, because she doesn't feel being part of low classes anymore but at the same time she doesn't come from high society.

Differences between Shaw and Wilde

Naturally not all writers belonging to Victorian Age cared about social problems. In fact, meanwhile Shaw employed his plays to make people think about society, Wilde wrote his books just to please his readers; as result of that Wilde's characters come from middle-high classes, while Shaw uses even poor people.

From a linguistic viewpoint, Shaw wants a profound change of English Alphabet meanwhile Wilde is not interested in it at all. Besides Wilde, as he is an Aesthetic author, is really interested in using a very lyrical and high language meanwhile Shaw employs a language reflecting characters' social background.